Pros: A large variety of people. Switching teams is manageable.

Cons: Too much work, escalations, meetings, and stress. Growth depends on your manager and the projects they give you.

Pros: Retail and Search are good. They actually work on developing new features and there are lots of opportunities to work on cutting-edge technologies. Amazon highly focuses on Perl-Mason and Java. Many systems are already in place, so you can reuse existing systems and work on developing new features. There are very good monitoring tools and it's a great place to learn if you land in the right org.

Cons: An organization like that is not a good organization. They have a very high operational load, and projects are not very good. If you are hired in a support role at Amazon.com, then becoming an SDE is very challenging. People lie, saying you will have the opportunity to become an SDE by doing development, but the fact is that support roles do not really get any development opportunities, so beware. It's very dynamic and agile, so you end up pushing incomplete features or working very long hours to meet deadlines.

Pros: Amazon pays well, offers interesting problems to work on, and allows you to switch teams fairly easily if you get bored. They also offer free snacks and coffee, and have great onsite food options in a nice office. I think work-life balance can be manager-dependent, but I've never had to work more than 8-hour days. I get to work from home up to 2 days a week and work flexible hours. We are also free to come in late or leave early if we have personal matters to attend to.

Cons: Engineers at Amazon are expected to be owners. That means owning the whole service from start to end. This results in spending a lot of time doing DevOps work (managing server capacity, renewing SSL certificates, etc.). It also results in an on-call rota, where you can get paged 24/7 and have to fix a problem impacting customers. Getting promoted is also a long and document-heavy process. It sometimes seems getting promoted to a higher level is harder than getting hired at that level.